THE OREGON SPORTSMAN 191 
bird again. Out of eighteen plates exposed that day on the grosbeak 
family, I got but five snaps at the mother, and three of these were 
poor ones. The fourth day I watched, the mother seemed to have 
charge of the feeding again, but she spent most of her time trying 
to coax the bantlings to follow her off into the bushes. It was hardly 
the father’s day for getting the meals, but, on the whole, he fed 
almost as much as the mother; otherwise the youngsters would not 
have received their daily allowance. 
I have watched at some nests where the young were cared for 
almost entirely by the mother, and I have seen others where those 
duties were taken up largely by the father. Many times I have seen 
both parents work side by side in rearing a family, but this pair of 
grosbeaks seemed to have a way of dividing duties equally and 
alternating with days of rest and labor. 
The parents fed their nestlings a diet of both fruit and insects. 
Once I saw the father. distribute a whole mouthful of green meas- 

Mother Black-Headed Grosbeak About to Feed Young 
uring-worms. The next time, he had visited a garden down the hill- 
side, for he brought one raspberry in his bill and coughed up three 
more. 
According to Bulletin No, 32 of the Bureau of Biological Survey, 
entitled ‘‘Food Habits of the Grosbeaks,’’ by W. L. MecAtee, the 
black-headed grosbeak is a bird of economic value to the fruit grower, 
notwithstanding the fact that it eats some fruit. An examination of 
226 stomachs of this bird, the majority of which were collected in 
California, shows that, during his six months’ stay in his summer 
home, the bird consumes an average of 34.15 per cent of vegetable and 
65.85 per cent of animal food. This bird shows a distinct preference 
for black-olive seale, one of the most abundant and destructive insects 
on the coast. This insect constitutes 20.32 per cent of the grosbeak’s 
entire food. Of the stomachs examined, this insect was found to 
have been eaten by 123 birds. This service alone more than pays 
fruit growers for the fruit the bird eats. To give a clearer estimate 
of the value of this bird to man, scientific observations show that, for 
every quart of fruit eaten, the black-headed grosbeak eats more than 
three pints of black-olive scales, more than a quart of flower beetles, 
besides a generous supply of canker worms and the pupae of the 
codling-moth, 
